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Last updated June  16, 2003
Internet resources for bilingual education
teachers, researchers and administrators.
Questions,
Current technology,
Statistics
Information
for Administrators, Instructors, Students and Parents
Teaching Tools
Internet,
technology, and the bilingual classroom
Conclusion
Afterthoughts:
Bilingual Education, and the Internet.
·
Introduction
o
What, can the Internet offer bilingual
education teachers, students and administrators? Is the fear of getting
left watching the World Wide Web’s digital divide expand along racial and
language lines impetus enough to justify the incorporation of mice, browsers
and LANs into the multi-cultural / multilingual curriculum? Are there
technological avenues, which are especially appropriate and advantageous for
use specifically in bilingual classrooms, teacher planning periods, and
administrative board meetings? In other words, what unique tools or
opportunities does the Internet afford bilingual education students and
teachers? What is the history of the Internet? What sites best serve to aid in
the education of English language learners? These and other questions will be
scrutinized.
top
o
Internet and Computer
Technology:
§
Current technology (2000): Describing
the progress which has been made in even the last three years is a formidable
task. While the cold war drove the creation of what eventually became ARPNET
(forerunner of the internet), the international arms / technology was over by
the early 90’s, leaving the then budding network industry in search for
direction and impetus for advancement. Besides large corporations and
universities, developments in bandwidth reduction, streaming video / audio,
and credit card processing / encryption were motivated in part by the on-line
pornography industry, which was the first sector to generate substantial
revenue from web commerce. Current user-end technology available for viewing,
use and or download includes but is not limited to nearly anything one can
think of: e-mail, streaming audio / video, text to speech, test generators,
forms pages, chat rooms, games with chat, web cartoons, animation, audio
files, video files, news groups, bulletin / message boards, multiple user
interfaces, data bases, text files, statistics, biographies, stories,
newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, poems, presentations, language
translators, tutorials, lesson plans, assessment instruments, magazines,
discussion groups, spell checkers, music players and creators, competitions,
collaborative projects, tangrams, puzzles, calculators, paint and draw
programs, virtual field trips…
top
§
Statistics: In 1984 there were
1000 network nodes, 5 years later –100,000-. Currently
there are about 634 million Internet
users (165 million in the united states alone) browsing well over 800 million
web pages. There were a reported
3.9 million users in Mexico.
According to the NTIA,
61.6% of those with college degrees now use the Internet, while only 6.6% of
those with an elementary school education or less use the Internet [graph].
Between 1997 and 1998, the White/Hispanic
gap for Internet access widened by 37.6%. Also the gap between computer
ownership for White and Hispanic Households continues to widen: from 1994 to
1998 the White/Hispanic gap increased 42.6%. Those earning under $20,000 and
using the Internet outside the home are twice as likely (2.12 times) to get
access through a public
library or community center than those earning more than $20,000. American
Indians/Eskimos/Aleuts, Blacks, and Hispanics more often turn to Internet
access outside
the home, compared to Whites. The e-Rate
program has helped connect more than 80,000 schools and libraries and helped
numerous children and adults learn how to use new technologies through new
points of access to the Internet. School
is the most popular access point, with more than 80 percent of youths age 10
to 17, according to a joint study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and National
Public Radio. Almost 63 percent of U.S. public-school
classrooms had T-1 Internet access by year-end 1999, the national student:computer
ratio also improved from 12 to 9:1, according to the National Center for Education
Statistics.
top
Information
access => Administrator, Instructor, Student and Parent
While some sites require a paid membership to
view their information, most offer their resources free of charge (including
applications) in hopes of building up web traffic through repeat visitors and
word of mouth recommendations. Although some applications and memberships are
worth purchasing, one can usually find comparable versions for free elsewhere,
affording access and use to nearly all the Internet’s resources free of
charge. Points of entry such as public
libraries and schools give individuals from all economic backgrounds
access to a wealth of information previously available only to academia and
the affluent. Nearly everything on the web can in some form or fashion be
found outside of the virtual world, however there is neither single edifice
nor organization besides the Internet where so much material may be accessed.
Such access is facilitated through the use of one of the many search engines
(Yahoo,
Google, HotBot,
Lycos, Dogpile, AltaVista,
Terra, Yupi),
which scan millions of pages of content, finding sites it believes most match
an entered query. Therein lies the web’s ability to empower, whether a king
or a lowly street sweeper- with a click of the mouse and the use of a browser
the world’s information unfolds (forever). With a creative mind, nearly
anything on the Internet can be used in a classroom setting. The proceeding
will focus on the facilitative role the web/technology can play for the enrichment
of the bilingual teacher, student, and administrator experience.
top
- Education
Information Webs: The wealth of internet information devoted to the
art of teaching is extraordinary, from grade level interdisciplinary
lesson plans to articles on the latest theories of literacy development,
government sites, general education sites and bilingual education sites
make up the bulk of what will be covered in this section. top
- Government
sites: No organization collects more data
on more diverse subjects and sub-groups of the population than the
federal government. Information collected is available free of charge
to those who know where to look and who to e-mail. Finding the right
person
inside the maze of agencies and departments is made easier through the
Internet, especially via FirstGov.com
(a
searchable index of all government agencies and publications) also
government sites such as Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
(FREE)
and Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM)
function quite adequately in bringing educators into contact with
federal (FREE) and private (GEM) instructional resources. Currently the
Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA)
(part of the Department of Education)
offers funding / grant information, model
strategies, descriptions of exemplary
urban programs, an extensive list of personal contacts
divided by region with e-mail addresses and technical support in the
way of support centers
and coordination of inter-departmental information from the Institute
of Education Sciences (IES)
which funds the National Research Center on English Learning and
Achievement (CELA) and the Center
for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE)
which is home to documents such as Bilingual
Cooperative Learning and From
At-Risk to Excellence among others. Departments one
may consider unlikely to contain information relevant to bilingual
education, such as the Dept. of Commerce’s National Telecommunications
and Information Administration (NTIA),
offer their findings on the digital
divide and the prevalence of internet
and computer ownership as well as access for Hispanics.
The Internet allows for non-profit,
district and school grant writing teams easy access to apply for federal
funds and help with grant implementation after proposal acceptance.
It also offers teachers and administrators access to a wealth of research
and initiatives pertaining
to bilingual education, education in general and English as a second
language. Prominentily displayed (but short on usable information) on
the Department of Education's website is president Bush's No
Child Left Behind initive. It would be remiss
to speak of government internet resources and not include individual
US states like California
as well as other nations: Canada, England,
Australia (also),
Sweden, Norway,
France, Japan,
Chile, Mexico,
Costa Rica, Guatemala
and other Spanish speaking nations (as bilingual education in the US
deals primarily with educating speakers of Spanish). A full review of
the 50 states and
other nations may be better presented at a later date. Whether directly
or indirectly, the above countries and states link to resources relevant
to furthering the bilingual education experience for teachers, students,
and / or administrators. It should also be pointed out that on average,
the US government consistently keeps their web resources and information
current and up to date. As you will see in the following discussion of
private sector webs, much on the information which uses terms like currently
and bilingual education today which can be misleading as some
have been last updated years ago (an issue this very website struggles
with as well). top
- Private
sectors: with information resources in the form of lesson plans,
research, theory, e-news, e-books, and bulletin boards come from many
fronts including non-profit organizations, universities, commercial
software / book / product vendors, teachers, students, parent
organizations, and the like. At times it is difficult to understand who
is ultimately behind the information that loads in a browser. Also rare
are sites with little or no agenda, this is especially true in regards
to language learning theory pages. Cummins talked about the presence
of misinformation and how to approach the subject in a 1998
discussion on technology and education:
Two
very socially committed Canadian educators, Maud Barlow and Heather-Jane
Robertson, for example, label the 'information superhighway' the
'disinformation superhighway'. I appreciate their reasons for being skeptical
about the Internet but the solution is not to abandon the playing field to
corporate or any other dominant group interests. The same corporate interests
that control the advance of technology also control the publishing industry
but no one has suggested that we should not publish books and articles or buy
books for our children just because these actions contribute to corporate
profits. Jim Cummins
top
- News
Media Articles: while at times difficult to understand a
journalist’s motive, e-articles are a good resource in understanding
the national state of bilingual education as well as gaining insight
on how bilingual education and multicultural education are portrayed
to the public. Education Week is
a good place to start, articles are free to the public and can be
arranged by category (bilingual
education). The Washington
Post also provides a wealth of general education articles again
at no charge, as does Rethinking
Schools’ online Urban
Education Journal. Articles and audio files are available for listening
on National
Public Radio.
Possibly, the fastest way to gain access to bilingual education news
is to employ what is called a news crawler, as its name suggests, it
“crawls” through hundreds of news sites scanning for recent
information pertinent to your query. EdailyNews offers searchable education
news articles culled from media sources daily. Dogpile.com’s
NewsCrawler,
along with Yahoo’s DailyNews
and
News
Index
search engines retrieve varied pertinent articles on the topic of
bilingual education. top
- Research
Journals Though many journals require membership to freely review
their article archives, most allow one to read summaries of current
and past issues. The National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education
(NCBE)
puts out the Bilingual
Research Journal, free web access granted to all articles prior
to 2003. NABE also hosts
1994-1996 issues of the Journal of Educational Issues for Language
Minority Students (JEILMS),
and 1994-1997 issues of the New York State Association for Bilingual
Education Journal (NYSABEJ).
Selected articles from TESOL's
Journal, Quarterly,
Matters (which
is being phased out by Fall of 2003 and replaced with Essential
Teacher) and the Southwest
Educational Development Laboratory are available free of charge.
American School Board Journal (ASBJ),
an editorially independent education magazine published monthly by
the National
School Boards Association offers up its wealth of articles,
searchable through an anthology
or a special setting on HotBot.
The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (IJBEB)
requires membership but will allow one to search the contents and view
article abstracts. The New Mexico Association of Bilingual Education
(NMABE)
offers full text views of a handful of their articles,
as does the National Network for Early Language Learning (NNELL)
with their journal.
The National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second
Language Learning (NCRCDSLL),
which was funded by the U.S. Department of Education through OERI from
1991 to 1995 offers up all their research
and reports.
Free and well laid out is the site for the Journal of Technology
Education (JTE).
Japan's Association for language teaching (JALT)
makes available excerpts of its journal The Language Teacher (TLT),
home of articles on Extensive
Reading and second language acquisition. Arizona's Conexiones Project
offers up articles
and links related to migrant, bilingual and multilingual
issues. The last in this review and probably the most laid back is
the Internet
Teacher
of English
as a Second Language Journal (ITESLJ),
completely free with articles, jokes, games and ESL challenges. top
- General
Bilingual Education Information Webs: Probably the biggest section
in this subsection including: university, school, non-profit and
private info-webs. These webs represent some of the most in-depth
English and Spanish resources available. From Australian
Aboriginal studies to papers by Krashen,
Cummins,
and de
Avila, the sheer number of sites make them easy to locate yet hard
to navigate through the merely well intentioned pages to those sites
which stand out in scope and depth. A first stop should probably be
Jim Crawford’s Language
Policy Web and Emporium, which explains much of the politics and
legalese surrounding bilingual education. Close behind is the Extensive
Reading (ER) Pages web, which contain a variety of papers
by Krashen and company on the merits of Free Voluntary Reading
now ER as well as an annotated
bibliography of studies involving FVR and other reading methods
for first and second language learners. Politics,
government and Latino issues are the focus of the Tomas Rivera Policy
Institute (TRPI), offering statistics
and current issues, college
advice for latino parents and research.
The Jim
Cummins (BICS/CALP)
web contains many of his recent as well as ground breaking early works
concerning second language learning and
literacy. Dave’s ESL café is
also a site full of usable content and varied resources. Other sites
such as the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL)
and the National Education Association (NEA)
offer overviews of the issues as well as program information and in
the case of the NEA, a comprehensive
guide to various resources pertaining to school
reform. The International
Confederation of Principals offers dozens of articles
on school
leadership and a few on bilingual
education as
part of their global collaborative mission; also committed to social
change is Café
Progressive which offers education discussions
and information.
Free access to on-line e-books is
available through the National
Academic Press for August and Hakuta’s Educating
Language Minority Children, and Improving
Schooling for Language Minority Children a Research Agenda. Other
titles available for reading on the net through the NEA include: Minority
Students in Special and Gifted Education, The
Case of Bilingual Education Strategies, Chinese
Students in America, Starting
out Right: A Guide to Children’s Reading Success, Resources
for Teaching Elementary School Science, Reinventing
Schools: The Technology is Now!, and Education
and Learning to Think. Literacy assessment and development webs
such as the University of Conneticut's Literacy
Web and I teach I learn.com’s
Literacy
Assessment site, offer literacy ideas as well as the chance to
add one’s own thoughts and ideas to current and future
projects. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
(ACTFL)
offers some relevant resources
and papers
pertinent to language learning. The University of Southern
California’s Center for Multilingual and Multicultural Research (CMMR)
is substantial in its range of programs. Jill
Kemper Mora of San Diego
State University offers: a presentation
(pictorial summary) of the theoretical principles behind bilingual
education, an Internet Classroom
for Teachers of Language-Minority Students (part of the Electronic
Classroom on Reading
On-Line.org), a road
map to effective biliteracy instruction planning, a guide to
planning instruction for English language development, a table
which outlines the bilingual education debate and other modules.
Also present are the many national,
state,
and local associations for bilingual education that unfortunately offer
little to non-members.
top
- Education
Clearinghouses: The U.S. Department
of Education funds a number of educational clearinghouses through
its varied educational departments (some of which have been renamed
due to the No Child
Left Behind Act). The Office of English Language
Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited
English Proficient Students (OELA)
formerly the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs
(OBEMLA)
finances the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition
(NCELA) mandating
it to collect, analyze, and disseminate
information relating to the
effective education of linguistically and culturally diverse learners
in the U.S. NCELA provides information through its Web site
and produces a weekly news bulletin, Newsline,
and manages a topical electronic discussion group (currently being
updated), NCBE
Roundtable. The largest database
of educational information makes up the Educational Resources
Information Center (ERIC),
a national information system with clearinghouses on: Language
and Linguistics, Reading
English and Communication, Rural and Urban
Education, Assessment, Elementary
Education, Information
Technology, Science and Math,
Social Studies,
Disabilities and Gifted Education, Parent
Information, Teacher Education.
Adjunct ERIC clearinghouses include: ESL
Literacy Education, and Educational
Opportunity. ERIC also has a searchable
digest engine containing brief 1-2 page articles on topics of
interest including multiculturalism, second
language learning, bilingual
education and ESL
and AskERIC a
e-mail forms page reference desk to help unearth hard to find
documents. The Center for Networked Information Discovery &
Retrieval (CNIDR) is a
clearinghouse for network information discovery with some relevance
to education. top
- Discussion
webs and message boards: at times the need for information
pertinent to a unique situation is required, this is just one of the
reasons one might turn to education message boards, info-request
forms, or listserv
which allow for feedback tailored to the situation. Interactive /
people on the other side, webs lend themselves to a feeling of
community and support not felt to the same degree on other sites. The
Knowledge Loom is one such
site -offering best practice, teacher anecdotes and expert advice.
This is also a place one might go to find a partner
classroom across the
country or across the ocean. ERIC provides a number of listservs
related to bilingual education free of charge while Arizona
State University’s Southwest Center for Education Equity and Language
Diversity (SCEED) charges
$15 dollars to join their bilingual
education listserv. The International Association for Language
Learning Technology (IALLT) offers its listserv
free of charge but reserves the right to reprint submissions in any
of its publications (none of which are offered on-line). Dave's ESL
Cafe has a number of discussion
boards including one on Bilingual
Education.
Google's listing of ESL
chats and forums includes mostly yahoo groups
listings for specific world regions. San Fransisco USD offers a message
board via its Language Academy
Clearinghouse. The New York Times’ Learning
Network holds a variety of discussion
groups including one on bilingual education (registration is free)
also available are daily lesson
plans. top
- Lesson
Plans: various databases, some previously listed in the government
section (FREE, GEM),
are well into the process of archiving thousands of lesson plans into
searchable databases. This saves preparation time as well as allows
for a better exchange of ideas on the closest level to the learners
themselves. First-year teachers can not only use successful lessons
but also better understand the components of a successful lesson.
Experienced teachers are given a forum where they can give back to
the teaching profession and troll for fresh ideas in much traveled
territory. ArtsEdge
offers art integrated plans for ESL
and Language
Learners. An exhaustive list of lesson
plan sites is available from Springfield
Township High School. Paso
Partners, from SEDL offers
integrated bilingual science, math and language units. Simpler is the
John Korber’s ESL
Lessons page with lessons on disasters, community design and
games. Sites with lesson plan databases greatly increase their chances
for repeat traffic provided the plans are abundant and well planned.
A variation on lesson plan sites is Mr.
O’s 3rd grade bilingual class manager, complete with plans
and scheduling for an entire year (1999)
a literacy
journal and TAAS instructional
objectives. Lesson plans are brief but it gives a sense of day
to day and week to week organization.
top
- Student
Learning Sites: Up to this point most of the resources benefit
bilingual education on the administrative and instructional planning
level with little mention of those resources, which involve the
student. This section as well as sections of the tools category will
deal with sites containing programs or technology manipulated for
concept building or language learning. Schools fortunate enough to
have in-classroom Internet connections can take advantage of the many
sites designed to interact directly with the learner in an engaging
yet educational manner. Many including: Learning.com,
contain audio and animation that serve to contextualize the input
as well as stimulate the viewer, content which is
exclusively in English is free for the first 30 days. KidLink
offers multi-lingual resources (English,
Spanish,
German,
Norwegian)
for parents,
teachers,
and children
high school age and younger including chat rooms and activity.
Resources such as Enlances
Bilingues para Maestros and Enlances
Educativos en Español serve up a substantial number of quality
websites both for bilingual teachers and their students as well.
Internet Public Library (IPL) is
also a site with quite a number of good resources and activities for
children as is Mr.
O's
On-line Reading room
which offers cartoon and regular text stories and information in
English and Spanish. Virtual
field trips galore can be found on the Archives
and Museum Informatics web. Programs like freeEnglish
Web Edition offer pronunciation help similar to a beginner’s
language lab at no cost; on the same site (freeEnglish)
there are some very engaging activities
which drill rules of grammar –flash
4 is required as is membership (both free). Also with engaging
ESL challenges is Peak English,
tailored more to the advanced student –with games
like Mortal Grammar and Hangman for the mature learner- and a
placement test that includes a listening section; membership is free
(though many resources are not). Less technologically inclined is the
Knowledge Network’s Webstories archive which includes links to tales
like Banph
(swashbuckling ant) and Moonlit
Road (scary stories). The United Kingdom’s Kidsdomain
offers prescreened links to instruction and games. Mykindasite
has stories, games, and free e-mail. Mr.
O's Science Fair Assistant gives kids help in finding experiment ideas in
Spanish or English. top
- For
Profit: at times it is quite difficult to discern if a site is
making a profit somehow through the sale of member preference
information, or log-out redirects. More easily spotted are sites that
seek to sell products or prominently place banner adds on top of the
site. For-profit webs tend to be very ascetically pleasing. These
sites are worth a look in that many are full of useful resources
designed by professional educators and programmers some sites such
as Learning.com, Classroom
Connect, and Tom
Snyder Productions
give a free trial membership. top
- Tools:
There is an abundance of freeware and shareware programs available
for free download as well as many programs that allow a free 30 day trail
(more
than enough time to complete a lesson). Also available are applications
which run on a web server, these range from text-to-speech and
currency converters to spatial reasoning and language translators. As is
true for all the tools listed in this collection, there are numerous
activities or uses that will go unmentioned as attempting to list them
all would be like writing a dictionary. top
- Language
Translation / Dictionaries: Cummins
sees the use of comparative language labs as a great resource for
empowerment of second language learners. Language translation programs
allow students to produce language in their mother tongue and then
see how what they wrote looks like in their second language. Instead
of
the language program “doing their work for them” it allows them to
find errors as a group or individually with the program’s
translation. Depending on the company, some are downloaded from the
Internet to the hard drive; others work completely on the server side
of the Internet. Cummins suggests this type of activity engages
learners in a way traditional classroom grammar acquisition does not.
The web version of SYSTRAN,
offers 34 language translation variations. Free
Translation.com includes 14 language translation variations. For
individual words, About.com’s
SpanishDict
dictionary offers audio clips of words in both English and Spanish. Internet
Oracle Online
houses links to 13
translators and dictionaries. top
- Text
to speech: A characteristic in language learning is that a
child’s listening level usually significantly exceeds his or her
reading level. The spoken word contextualizes the input instead of
relying on the language learner to decide pronunciation, inflection
and cadence. Text-to-speech programs and sites act like reading
training wheels. Allowing the student to follow the written word
visually while hearing the text aurally reinforces efficient
negotiations of textual meaning and raises the level at which the
student can work independently. While speech synthesizers to date fall
short of human speech performance, they are tireless, require no
prerecording, many are free, and newer versions do a better job of
speech reproduction every release. An example of high quality at no
cost is the ReadPlease 2003,
which offers different voices, multiple languages and variable speed;
it also highlights words within the text as it reads. ReadPlease 2003
must
be downloaded then installed on the hard drive, as does Digalo (free
trial version), Elan
text-to-speech will read text in English, Spanish, French, German,
Russian and Portuguese (free trial version). With a free 60-day
trial period, the WinSpeech gives
ample time to decide its worth. Speak
Lite of Shadisoft uses
an animated Microsoft character to read text and offer up smart remarks
(free in limited version). top
- E-Lective
Language Learning: Developed by Cummins
in a technology
theory paper, this tool heightens cognate awareness and renders
above level texts comprehensible. Though there are few
proof of concept examples on the Internet, the software now exists,
though is not yet available. top
- Test
generation software: The Hot
Potatoes suite from Half-Baked
software offers six applications, enabling one to create
interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence,
crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide
Web or hard copy. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of
charge for non-profit educational users. Hot Potatoes is but one
option in test / quiz generation software.
- Free
on-line and downloadable grade books: vGrade.com
offers a suite of applications designed to increase teacher
productivity. Hosted on their servers, teachers can access the
web-based applications for grade keeping, file uploading, and
parent/student communication. See download.com
for more options.
- E-Mail:
Most adults can remember a time in their school age years when they
wrote letters to a class across the state, country or nation. The
excitement of finding out about a pen pal from another region is not
easily forgettable. While there are no guarantees that people are who
they say they are in chat rooms, contacting another school through
their website is a fairly secure way to ensure e-pals are who they
claim to be. E-pals also allow students to communicate rapidly and
with the help of certain e-classroom websites, learners can even pick
the country from which they wish their e-pal to originate. A class
studying volcanoes could pick a sister-project class with access to
volcanic activity, do interviews... empowering the other class as
experts. English language learning could be the goal; choosing a
sister class from Japan or Scandinavia would necessitate that
communication take place in English. Conversely, a class from the
Philippines, Spain, or the Spanish speaking Americas would afford
(Spanish speaking) participants an opportunity to develop cultural
awareness while partaking in curriculum enriching activities in their
first language.
Using
the Internet for sister class exchanges and joint projects illustrate the
reality of diversity in our global environment and the foolishness of either
ignoring or pathologizing it in our education systems. Jim Cummins
Free Educational Mail Network,
oldest and largest of the educational networks in the U.S., uses the Internet
to link more than 140 electronic bulletin boards. FrEdMail offers
collaborative activities designed to help students become better writers and
learners. It also promotes the sharing of resources and experiences among
teachers. An e-mail must be sent to arogers@bonita.cerf.fred.org
requesting directions to the nearest node. Intercultural E-Mail Classroom
Connections (IECC) is a free service
to help teachers find partners in other countries and cultures for e-pal,
project exchanges, and educator discussions. Children ages 16+ looking for
an e-pal need look no further than E-pals.
Setting up e-mail accounts for a classroom is as free as hotmail.com,
mail.com, especially for kids are: surfmonkey.com
and
Mykindasite.
top
- Web
Cams: Similar to the e-pal concept, two classes equipped with web
cams could actually have class together, provided time zone
differentials are surmountable. Web cams also make interactive multi-campus
teacher in-services more feasible. They give learners
the chance to observe far away places as well, they can see for
themselves what the Rocky Mountains look like, or experience the
darkness of Japan when it is daytime North America. Web cams also give
students a chance to create movies, which can be archived for other
students to watch. For instance students could be broken up into
groups and asked to design the grammar mini-lessons for the week, or
act out a story for the class. AfriCam
offers 7 live feeds in what they bill as the world's first virtual
game reserve. For simply the most web cams try EarthCam. Other single
site views include: San
Francisco, the Israel,
New York, Paris, Glasgow
(multiple), Spain, Antarctica,
Niagra
Falls,
Japan, Norway, Pakistan,
and Indiana.
top
- Internet,
technology, and the bilingual classroom
- The
case for empowerment: Cummins speaks of the need to empower
students, second language learners especially. This empowerment comes,
he believes through what Alma Flor Ada calls critical literacy. The
final stages of her progression include questioning the cultural
relevance of a report or story and then based on learner discussion
deciding on a plan of action. In Ada’s
discussion with Dr. Cummins and Dr. Ramirez as part of the booklet Virtual
Power: Technology, Education and Community, she describes technology
as a separate type of literacy:
Technology
is indeed a new form of literacy. If our children are not well educated
technologically, they will not have an opportunity to have equal access, but
there are certain caveats to this. The first one is that we should not think
that technology, itself, is going to teach children to think critically. I
think students need to be, parallel to their learning of technology, acquiring
an ability for self-discovery, self-awareness, understanding of others, and
certainly high levels of critical reasoning. I want them to have as much
access and understanding of technology as possible always from the perspective
of mastering these tools so that they can become an instrument for the
expression of that critical awareness that is developed in them.
Alma Flor Ada.
According
to department of education studies, much of the population served by bilingual
education relies on the public library and schools for their access to the
Internet. It is vital that these students be given every opportunity to
utilize and explore the array of resources it offers. From information
gathering, and application familiarity, to critical web-literacy, second
language learners need exposure to this empowering tool.
There
is no shortage of case studies showing how the Internet can and has been used
for transformative purposes by educators in many countries around the world
and I believe it can be a major tool for social action and empowerment of both
teachers and students within bilingual education programs.
Jim Cummins
top
- A
word of caution: Spending 100% of class time on the Internet, using
it for all classroom activities or talking only with
teachers you meet in chat rooms is probably detrimental to
instruction. With any innovation there comes the temptation to overuse
a new resource. Web use and educational gains most likely share a
curvilinear relationship.
I
certainly agree that it is naive to engage in uncritical 'hype' about
technology solving our educational or any other of the social problems that we
have in abundance. We need to look very carefully at how we are using
technology and, as all of us have suggested, use it within the context of a
transformative pedagogy that is focused on challenging coercive relations of
power. Jim Cummins
While the Internet’s vast
range of uses make it appear superior to former innovations such as language
labs, questions need to be asked before choosing the web resources as all
or part
of the instructional vehicle for accomplishing a determined instructional
objective.
I
certainly agree that it is naive to engage in uncritical 'hype' about
technology solving our educational or any other of the social problems that we
have in abundance. We need to look very carefully at how we are using
technology and, as all of us have suggested, use it within the context of a
transformative pedagogy that is focused on challenging coercive relations of
power. Jim Cummins
Questions such as: would the
use of technology improve the experience? Is the instructional objective met
directly by the use of the Internet? Are there enough resources so that every
learner has a chance to receive the benefit the use of the web will have? Is
the amount of teacher preparation time / learner acclimation time necessary
to use the Internet for a certain activity justified? Have programs (We-Blocker,
Cybersitter, Surf-Watch,
X-Detect) been installed to
block students from purposely or accidentally accessing violent, pornographic
or
otherwise inappropriate materials? Should they?
top
- Conclusion.
Although the digital divide remains an issue for concern, the past few
years have seen economically depressed schools receive financial help in
bringing Internet access into their classrooms.
As
far as access in schools is concerned - initially the type of schools that
were wired were ones that were well resourced anyway. But now, with the new
federal technology grants there is a commitment to identify those schools with
the least amount of tech resources and let them have first dibs on this
funding. Doctor David Ramirez.
Good teaching with paper, pencil and loads of
books will always be better than poor teaching with lots of time on the
Internet. When used with caution and creativity, the web can make good
teaching even better, and transform students of all ages and tongues into
empowered technological literates. top
J
Olmanson
Current state of bilingual education (summer
2000):
As an institution, bilingual education has been attacked and maligned since
its inception in modern American society. Recently individuals from the English
for the Children movement have mobilized families and communities with
rhetoric and criticism of transitional bilingual language programs. With the
1998 passing of proposition 227, the children of California became test
subjects in a program that offers little first language support. Research
reveals the great potential bilingual education is capable of unleashing in
its
students. A base of cognitive understanding and development in a student’s
first language best equips them to negotiate meaning, contribute, and learn
in a second or third language. The responsibility of bilingual education is
extra-ordinary in the obstacles it faces on many levels. For instance,
children receiving instruction in their first language (not English) must also
find time during the school day to learn a new language. Meanwhile their
English-speaking peers are advancing as well, making the point at which second
language learners equal the performance of monolingual students a fast moving
target. Another difficulty facing bilingual education in Texas
and other states, which employ high-stakes testing to determine student
promotion / retention and teacher / school effectiveness, is the growing
temptation to reassign some or all English as a Second Language (ESL)
instructional periods to teach test taking strategies or allocate less
preparation time for ESL due to the pressure of raising classroom test scores
(especially applicable when bilingual students take exams in their first
language). top
History: Elements of the Internet can be traced back as
far as the mid 1800’s when communities got connected via the telegraph
system. This first taste of electronic messaging initiated the constriction of
the world through instant messaging. The telephone was next and the computer
followed during World War II thanks to the intricacy of German codes and
brilliant British ingenuity (Flowers).
The cold war (as did WWII) created a high level of technology funding which
was evident in the increased of capabilities and complexity of electronics
devices. The success of Sputnik
(1957) added urgency to the US technology development machine and was the
direct catalyst for the creation of the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
This agency –filled with some of America’s best and brightest- put a
satellite into orbit 18 months after its formation, they proceeded to focus
their energies in later years on computer networking and communications
technology. In 1969 the first
interface message was keyed in on the UCLA campus and received by the
Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park 350 miles away (a direct result of Dr.
Leonard Kleinrock’s theory of multi-packet switching). The military had
a high interest in his theory in that it was much more difficult to intercept
information traveling in such a way, the multi-packet switching also allowed
the information to travel around alternate open network routes which, in the
case of a catastrophe or nuclear war would be vital to the government’s
ability to send counter attack orders and exchange information. 1972 saw the
creation of Telnet
and the first public demonstration of ARPNET
(the links set up between various college campuses), which was met with high
media attention and public enthusiasm. Norway and England get hooked up to
ARPNET in 1973. The queen of England sent her first e-mail in 1976, the same
year UNIX
was developed (this allowed networks to talk to each other). The late 70’s
saw the formation of newsgroups and widespread inter-campus e-mail usage. In
1980, Tim Berners-Lee wrote
the first browser, which he modifies and names WorldWideWeb
in 1990. His program allowed individuals with Internet access the ability to
interface and view information; his browser would later become the Netscape
Navigator. top
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